Last month (June 7), Controlled Demolition, Inc. of Maryland attempted to remove the 1000-foot WFXL-TV broadcast tower in Doerun, GA after it had been struck and damaged by an Army Chinook helicopter.  This would have been a simple exercise except that the WFXL tower had a sister structure–the 1,000-foot WALB tower–nearby.  The guy wires for the two towers overlapped.  But Controlled Demolition was convinced that they could cut the WFXL guy wires and have the tower fall away from the WALB tower.  Sometimes things don’t work out as planned.

As the video shows, things went as expected at first.  The guy wires were severed with explosives and the WFXL tower fell away from the WALB tower.  Unfortunately, it appears that one of the severed guy wires wrapped around the WALB tower (or perhaps around one of the WALB tower’s guy wires), and the WALB tower came crashing down, too.  As my friend Mark said, “the bigger they are, the bigger the mess when they fall.”

I got a good chuckle out of the voice on the video after the second tower came down:  “I…we are all a little stunned. We did not really expect to see both towers come down like that.”  Ya think?

For a more detailed description and lots of neat pictures featuring twisted metal, see this writeup.